The referee should have stopped it in the tenth. Punching at will, Donald Trump said, "Hillary used the power of her office to make $250 million. Why not put some money in? You made a lot of it while you were secretary of State? *snip* That's the decisive issue of the campaign: the corrupt machinations of a ruling elite that considers itself above the law, and the rage of the American people against the oligarchical ruling class that has pulled the ladder up behind it. Trump's bombshell below Clinton's waterline came at the end of the debate, well prepared by...

David P. Goldman, aka Spengler, tells how bad it is for Hillary Clinton and her supporters. He seems to agree with the call I made Saturday morning, that Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” remark could cost her the election. I think this paragraph is brilliant: You can’t win an American presidential election without the deplorables’ vote. Deplorables are America’s biggest minority. They might even be the American majority. They may or not be racist, homophobic and so forth, but they know they’re deplorable. Deplorable, and proud. They’re the median family whose real income has fallen deplorably by 5% in the...

Last year I arrived early for a lunch address by Gen. Michael Hayden, who ran the National Security Agency and later the Central Intelligence Agency in the George W. Bush administration. Hayden was already there, and glad to chat. The conversation turned to Egypt, and I asked Hayden why the Republican mainstream had embraced the Muslim Brotherhood rather than the military government of President al-Sisi, an American-trained soldier who espoused a reformed Islam that would repudiate terrorism. “We were sorry that [Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed] Morsi was overthrown” in July 2013, Hayden explained. “We wanted to see what would happen...

Yet another criminal known to security services has perpetrated a mass killing, the Tunisian Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel. Why did the French police allow a foreign national with a criminal record of violence to reside in France? Apart from utter incompetence, the explanation is that he was a snitch for the French authorities. Blackmailing Muslim criminals to inform on prospective terrorists is the principal activity of European counter-terrorism agencies, as I noted in 2015. Every Muslim in Europe knows this. The terrorists, though, have succeeded in turning the police agents sent to spy on them and forcing them to commit suicide attacks...

The outcome of tonight’s apparent coup attempt in Turkey remains unclear, but the motivation for regime change in Turkey has been building under the surface for years. Turkey faces a perfect storm of economic, political and foreign policy problems. First, Turkey’s much-heralded economic growth spurt of the 2000’s has come to a grinding stop. The Erdogan boom, which inspired predictions that Turkey might emerge as another China, resembled the Asian experience less than it did the Latin American credidt bubbles of the 1980s or the American subprime bubble of the 2000s. I wrote last April 25: Turkey’s economy appears to...

Trump says he'll rebuild the U.S. military and our missile defense in particular, but avoid committing U.S. forces overseas. The neo-conservatives never will forgive him for this. It means that they are out of a job, and when they say that Trump means "the end of the Republican Party," they mean the end of the Republican Party that used to employ them. Robert Kagan and Max Boot have gone to the Clinton camp. A Trump presidency almost certainly means that Chinese and Russian influence will grow faster and with fewer obstacles than it might have otherwise. That is not entirely...

Americans are shrewd. You can’t spit on them and tell them it’s raining. They know the game is rigged against them. They know it’s rigged the same way that they know a lottery is rigged: There aren’t any winners. They know that they are downwardly mobile because they aren’t upwardly mobile. Americans don’t mind playing against bad odds–they play the lottery all the time–but they think that they are playing against zero odds. Ordinary Americans had an outside chance to get rich until 2008. Now they have no chance at all.

The betting markets on the American primary elections show an 87% probability that Hillary Clinton will head the Democratic ticket and a 76% probability that Donald Trump will lead the Republicans. Between the two, Trump is the pro-Israel candidate. First, his daughter Ivanka is an observant Orthodox Jew after her conversion and marriage to Jared Kushner, the scion of a prominent family of Jewish philanthropists. Second, and most decisive, Trump feels no obligation to win favor among Muslims, proposing a temporary ban against any Muslim entering the United States. Hillary Clinton, by contrast, surrounded herself with advisers openly hostile to...

Corporate America wanted nothing to do with Ronald Reagan in 1980. Not a single Fortune 500 CEO backed him-all of them supported George H. W. Bush or John Connally in the primaries. When informed of this (Jude Wanniski, who was at the meeting, told me), Reagan said that he didn't need them-he would be the candidate of the entrepreneur, the small businessman, the farmer, the workingman. Cruz wants to be Reagan redux. The Establishment remembers Reagan; in particular, it remembers that the corporate powers-that-be of 1980 were dwarfed by the entrepreneurial newcomers whom the Reagan reforms unleashed. It didn't like...

Germany's leaders have nothing of signifcance to say about the worst outbreak of sexual assaults in Germany since the Red Army moved out after World War II. Why won't they do anything? Answer: for the same reason that the Catholic Church insists that Islam is a religion of peace. The alternative--watching from a distance a civilizational collapse in real time with its attendant horrors--is too terrible for Angela Merkel or Pope Francis I to contemplate. They would rather take casualties than absorb the horror of the situation. The root of the problem is theological. The West is paralyzed by its...

Saudi Arabia stews in policy hell: Spengler By David P. Goldman on January 3, 2016 in David P. Goldman, Spengler, China, Middle East, AT Top Writers Last week's mass executions in Saudi Arabia suggest panic at the highest level of the monarchy. The action is without precedent, even by the grim standards of Saudi repression. In 1980 Riyadh killed 63 jihadists who had attacked the Grand Mosque of Mecca, but that was fresh after the event. Most of the 47 prisoners shot and beheaded on Jan. 2 had sat in Saudi jails for a decade. The decision to kill the...

Ted Cruz is intellectually arrogant, like Ronald Reagan. The difference is that Reagan masked his arrogance with self-deprecating humor. Sen. Cruz does a Reagan impression that would do a nightclub comedian proud, but he doesn’t have Reagan’s easy and spontaneous humor. One doesn’t think of Reagan as arrogant, but he was in fact the most arrogant leader we have had since Lincoln. He ignored the whole of the foreign policy establishment in his conviction that America stood to win the Cold War and bring down Communism. Then as now, the foreign policy establishment resembled Jonathan Swift’s scientists on the floating...

Liberals believe that social engineering can bring about universal success; conservatives want to foster individual responsibility and initiative. For liberals, the failure of an individual is a failure of society; for conservatives, individuals should be allowed to succeed or fail on their own merits. There are degrees, of course; most conservatives eschew Social Darwinism or Ayn Randâ€™s egotism, and most liberals do not believe in the strict application of the Communist maxim, â€śfrom each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.â€ť But that is the bright line that divides us conservatives from the liberals.Why are (most)...

We have heard over and over again that America is still the worldâ€™s fountain of innovation, the home of fracking and Facebook. The two â€śFâ€™sâ€ť of American innovation are about to become one: The collapse of oil prices portends a collapse of the shale boom. High-yield energy bond yields have soared from 5% to 12% in the past few months, and investors are fighting to get to the door. Most unconventional oil and gas projects are unprofitable at $60 a barrel, and thatâ€™s where oil will trade for the next year or two.Facebook is a clever gimmick, but it...

Obama’s “we-don’t-have-a-strategy” gaffe was so egregious as to distract attention from the fact that he does indeed have a strategy, which has blown up in his face. His strategy is accommodation with Iran at all costs. As I wrote earlier this month, our ISIS problem derives from our Iran problem: Bashar Assad’s ethnic cleansing, which has displaced 4 million Syrians internally and driven 3 million out of the country, was possible because of Iranian backing. The refugee flood in Iraq and Syria gives ISIS an unlimited pool of recruits. Iraqi Sunni support for ISIS, including the participation of some of...

China and Russia evidently have concluded a 30-year gas deal which shifts the balance of Russian hydrocarbon exports eastwards, but thatâ€™s not the thing to focus on. Pravda reports: The central themes of the talks between the two leaders will be two projects in the field of aviation â€“ the creation of a joint wide-body long-haul aircraft and the production of Mi-26 heavy helicopter in China, the Kommersant reports.Russia, entering into such cooperation with China, indicates that it is ready to open access to Russian aircraft technologies, despite the fact that China previously resorted to building unlicensed copies of...

Gander Mountain, which sold a weapon used in a Christmas Eve shooting that left two Rochester, N.Y.-area volunteer firefighters dead, is being sued on behalf of the victims. The semi-automatic rifle used by William Spengler Jr. on Dec. 24, 2012, to kill two West Webster firefighters and wound two others was purchased at a Gander Mountain store by his neighbor Dawn Nguyen. Spengler couldn't buy the gun because he was a felon. The Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence says it filed a lawsuit Tuesday on behalf of the four victims claiming that St. Paul-based Gander Mountain should have realized...

Itâ€™s 2015, and there is a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. The Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood (Hamas), financed by Iran, wins an election on a platform demanding the expulsion of the Jews from Israel. Iran, meanwhile, smuggles shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles to terrorist cells in Palestine that can take down civilian airlines at Ben-Gurion Airport. With backing from the Egyptian military, Fatah throws out the elected Hamas government and kills a large number of Hamas supporters. What will Washington do? Given the track record of both the Obama administration and the Republican mainstream, one would...

Two mutually incompatible arguments are advanced to defend gay marriage. The first states that marriage is a good thing provided by the state, such that gay people have the same right to it as anyone else. The second states that marriage is a bad thing, and that bringing gay people into the institution of marriage will destroy it from the inside. Michelangelo Signorile, a prominent gay activist, urges people in same-sex relationships to "demand the right to marry not as a way of adhering to society's moral codes but rather to debunk a myth and radically alter an archaic institution"....

American leaders bring to mind the last Abbasid Caliph, who made no preparations for the approach of the Mongols in 1258. What, asked al-Musta'sim Billah, could Mongol arrows do to the walls of Baghdad? When the Mongol commander Hulagu Khan arrived on January 29, though, he had with him 1,000 Chinese bombardiers, as well as Persian, Turkish and Georgian auxiliaries. Historians disagree as to whether the Mongols used cannon or counterweighted catapults, but in any case the bombardment breached the city's walls within three weeks, and they proceeded to slaughter between 200,000 and a million of its inhabitants. There are...

WEBSTER, N.Y. (AP) — Police have found human remains in the burned-out home of the Webster, N.Y., ex-con who killed two firefighters and believe the victim is the gunman's sister. Police Chief Gerald Pickering said Tuesday the remains were found in the charred house that 62-year-old William Spengler shared with his 67-year-old sister, Cheryl. A medical examiner will need to determine the identity. Police say Willliam Spengler armed himself with a revolver, shotgun and military-style rifle before he set his house afire to lure first responders into a pre-dawn death trap on Christmas Eve. Pickering says Spengler "was equipped to...

America is in incipient decline, and this week’s presidential election might be the last chance to reverse it. We are becoming a different sort of country, with a different people and different beliefs. Another four years of Barack Obama well might take us past the point of no return, although no-one, to be sure, knows quite where that lies. There is still time to change course. There might not be time by 2016. Nearly a third of Americans now depend on food stamps, welfare, disability payments, or some other form of government support, compared with one out of five when...

I suggested during our conference call yesterday that the only friend the Muslim Brotherhood has in high places is Barack Obama. I didn't mean that facetiously. Turkey's application to join the SIno-Russian Shanghai Cooperation Organization following Prime Minister Erdogan's July 19 pilgrimage to Russia is a diplomatic humiliation for the United States, and of the first order. Just when Washington is demanding that Russia withdraw support for the Assad regime in Syria, and when Turkey is the linch-pin for American logistics in support of the Syrian opposition, Erdogan has proposed in effect to joint the Russian-Chinese club (without being compelled...

...Washington has done everything possible to reach out to the Muslim Brotherhood. It called loudly for Hosni Mubarak's resignation when protests erupted in early 2011. It invited Brotherhood representatives to the White House last April, before Egypt's presidential elections. It backed Morsi's August 12 cold coup against the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces and the firing of Gen. Tantawi and the old guard of the Egyptian military, and embraced Tantawi's successor Gen. El-Sisi, a Brotherhood member. The White House said nothing when Morsi traveled to Iran in late August, breaking Iran's diplomatic isolation, believing (as the Council on Foreign...

I will not address the scientific grounds for circumcision (which among other things drastically reduces the transmission of infections including AIDS), because your decree has nothing to do with science. Rather, as Heinrich Heine wrote in 1844 of your city of Cologne, Dummheit und Bosheitbuhltenhier GleichHunden auf freierGasse; Die Enkelbruterkennt man nochheut An ihremJudenhasse. (Stupidity and evil mated here / Like dogs in the open gutter / You still can recognize their descendants today / By their Jew-hatred).

A retired US Marine officer with whom I corresponded asked, "What type of crisis do you think will cause the intellectual right to form a critical mass - if that is even possible?" I wrote back, "Lincoln's Second Inaugural is chiseled on the wall of his monument, and he said all that needs to be said. If they won't take it from Lincoln, why would they take it from us?" But it's Lincoln's birthday, and it's time for another try. Abraham Lincoln is America's least popular president. It seems odd to say this given the near-deification of a man who...

Want to see what America would look like without private equity? Move to Detroit and contemplate the ruins of a city ruined by the placid conformity of auto industry executives. The economic impact of the corporate takeover business can’t be measured by the outcome of takeovers as such. Private equity transformed the way American business thought about the world. If managers did a lousy job, outside investors could raise money (a lot of it from trade union pension funds as well as university endowments) and kick them out. Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry should be ashamed of themselves for bean-counting...

One popular comedian argues that it must be dreadful to spend eternity in heaven. No matter how wonderful it might be at first, eventually you're bound to get used to it and end up bored to death. By the same reasoning, one would shrug off the torments of hell over time, and the experience would be the same as heaven. Truth told, Dante's account of the saints contemplating the Godhead in the "Paradiso" section of Dante's Divine Comedy always bored me, without having to wait for too much of eternity to tick by.

Has America become irrational? Not since the 1930s have politics been so polarized, from the Tea Party movement on one side of the spectrum to the Occupy Wall Street protesters on the other. Why does the right object so vehemently to government spending? And why does the left attack private capital with parallel passion? The answer lies not in the American psyche, but in the statistics. America is engaged in class war, but not of the sort one reads about in the mainstream press. The truly indigent - young African-American men, for example, most of whom are now unemployed -...

Here's your final exam question in Middle Eastern studies: A mass of Coptic Christians marches through Cairo to protest the military government's failure to protect them from Muslim radicals. They are attacked by stone-throwing, club-wielding rowdies. Armed forces security personnel intervene, and the Copts fight it out with the soldiers, with two dozen dead and scores injured on both sides. Who is to blame? The full credit answer is: Benjamin Netanyahu, for building apartments in Jerusalem. If that's not what you wrote, don't blame me if you can't get a job at the New York Times. Rarely in the course...

A small country, its land reclaimed from a hostile nature, fights for survival against overwhelming odds for 80 years. Surrounded by enemies dedicated to its destruction, it fields the world's most innovative army and beats them. Despite three generations of war, the arts, sciences and commerce flourish. Its population grows quickly while the conflict empties the failed states that surround it. And it becomes a beacon of hope for the cause of freedom. I refer not to Israel, but to the Dutch Republic of the 17th century, whose struggle for freedom against Spain set the precedent for the American Revolution....

Much as I admire the late Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, who turned his horrific experience at Auschwitz into clinical insights, the notion of "man's search for meaning" seems inadequate. Just what about man qualifies him to search for meaning, whatever that might be?

Here are two gigantic concepts that will crack your head wide open.Neal Gabler, a journalist at the Norman Lear Center of the University of Southern California, recently published in the New York Times the opinion that our society “no longer thinks big,” that there are no more “intellectually challenging thoughts,” and, if a Marx or a Nietzsche were suddenly to appear, blasting his ideas, no one would pay the slightest attention, certainly not the general media.… Gabler is wrong on all counts. Not only have truly big ideas been advanced recently, but the mass media (apparently not the New York...

In fact, the glass is half full: the non-bubble parts of the US economy are functioning reasonably well. That suggests that the whole economy could function well, if the glass were not half-poisoned (if oppressive taxes and regulation did not hobble the great American startup machine). I contrast America’s two economies in piece this morning at Asia Times Online: > Item: Americans with no college-level education have an unemployment rate of 9.9% and (which is much more revealing) a labor-force participation rate of just 61%. Americans with some college education have an unemployment rate of 8.6% and a participation rate...

There's something deeply anomalous about a stock market crash at the peak of United States corporate profitability. Nothing like this ever has happened before. Nonetheless, judging from overnight moves in Asian markets, last week's plunge in world stock markets will be repeated in Europe and America on Monday morning - although recent intraday moves have been so extreme that one is loath to guess. Standard and Poor's downgrade of American sovereign debt from the highest, triple-A rating may be the silliest pretext for a stock market crash in world history. America is the only big industrial country in the world...

People seem to act irrationally when they have nothing to lose. Often we observe in wars that the losing side expends more blood and treasure after its position becomes hopeless. The American South sustained most of its casualties in the Civil War after July 1863, when the dual defeats at Gettysburg and Vicksburg made its position untenable. Athens suffered its worst casualties in the Sicilian gamble at the end of the Peloponnesian War. The Spanish ruined their empire and depopulated their core provinces during the second half of the Thirty Years War of 1618-1648 rather than cede dominance to France....

President Barack Obama's best hope of re-election lies in provoking Republicans to force the United States into technical default, engineering a brief but severe financial crisis in order to appear as crisis-manager-in-chief. The Tea Party movement may be marching into a political ambush, in which Obama will be able to portray the born-again budget-cutters as irresponsible fanatics who threaten to tip America into a new depression. The now unpopular president then would assume the role of national savior in time of crisis. What would happen if August arrives without an increase in the US debt ceiling? There is no good...

No man is an island, especially in the markets. Our consumption basket includes the efforts of hundreds of millions of people around the world, and our right to consume depends on our ability to sell to hundreds of millions of people around the world. During the present century the number of adults in affluent and productive countries will shrink by about a third. All of us will be poorer. There will be a third fewer people earnings profits for businesses, paying taxes to governments, buying homes or cars, or taking vacations. Starting around 2015 the adult population will start to...

We aren't going to have another financial crash. In fact, nothing at all is going to happen. Forecasting the United States economy is about as exciting as predicting next quarter's gross domestic product in 1957 Poland. You want to know what's going to happen, comrade? Read the Five Year Plan. With 40% of US personal income coming from transfer payments, it's almost nostalgic to call it capitalism. The so-called American economic recovery won't die, because it's undead. It was a zombie to begin with. Equity investors during the past six weeks came to the collective conclusion that the US is...

Egypt is running out of food, and, more gradually, running out of money with which to buy it. The most populous country in the Arab world shows all the symptoms of national bankruptcy - the kind that produced hyperinflation in several Latin American countries during the 1970s and 1980s - with a deadly difference: Egypt imports half its wheat, and the collapse of its external credit means starvation. The civil violence we have seen over the past few days foreshadows far worse to come. The Arab uprisings began against a background of food insecurity, as rising demand from Asia priced...

Never before in American politics have so few offered so little to so many. I refer to the prospective Republican candidates for next year's presidential elections, not a single one of whom elicits a response that might be mistaken for enthusiasm from the voters, the pundits, or the party's elder statesmen. There are a couple of generic governor types like Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota or Mitch Daniels of Indiana, and a long list of has-beens and never was's. But the Republicans despair of finding the man or woman who can define an alternative to a weak and waffling President Barack...

"In the south it all started after a group of school students started to write some sort of proclamations and complaints, protesting against growing food prices," Middle East analyst Vladimir Ahmedov told The Voice of Russia March 24. Arab-language Syrian press reports and blog posts indicate that the administration of President Basher al-Assad tried to prevent a rise in food prices, but provoked instead a wave of hoarding that has pushed the price of staples like oil and rice "above the purchasing power of consumers", as the online daily al-Tashreen reported from Damascus March 27. As I wrote in Food...

Once America had allies. Now it has Facebook friends. Google News turns up more than 5,000 news reports including the search terms "Facebook", "Egypt" and "revolution". The same soap-bubble of global youth culture that gave us the Internet stock bubble in the 1990s has returned, this time as the solution to the problems of the Arab world. With the last bubble, people got poor. This time people will get killed. As a reality check: the search terms "Egypt", "revolution" and "genital mutilation" turn up just seven stories in Google News (including a previous essay by this writer). Many Egyptian women...

Even Islamists have to eat. It is unclear whether President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt will survive, or whether his nationalist regime will be replaced by an Islamist, democratic, or authoritarian state. What is certain is that it will be a failed state. Amid the speculation about the shape of Arab politics to come, a handful of observers, for example economist Nourel Roubini, have pointed to the obvious: Wheat prices have almost doubled in the past year. Egypt is the world's largest wheat importer, beholden to foreign providers for nearly half its total food consumption. Half of Egyptians live on less...

Even Islamists have to eat. It is unclear whether President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt will survive, or whether his nationalist regime will be replaced by an Islamist, democratic, or authoritarian state. What is certain is that it will be a failed state. Amid the speculation about the shape of Arab politics to come, a handful of observers, for example economist Nourel Roubini, have pointed to the obvious: Wheat prices have almost doubled in the past year. Egypt is the world's largest wheat importer, beholden to foreign providers for nearly half its total food consumption. Half of Egyptians live on less...

Social scientists attached to the Second Marine Battalion in Afghanistan last year circulated a startling report on Pashtun sociology, in the form of a human terrain report on male sexuality among America's Afghan allies. The document, made available by military sources, is not classified, just disturbing. Don't ask, don't tell doesn't begin to qualify the problem. These are things you didn't want to know, and regret having heard. The marines got their money's worth from their Human Terrain adjuncts, but the report might have considered whether male pedophilia in Afghanistan has a religious dimension as well as a cultural one....

Get out of Muni Bond Funds NowDecember 10th, 2010 By David Goldman I’ve been warning for months that a few state and municipal bankruptcies (actually, a few states and a great many city bankruptcies) will be required to slay the beast of government-union pension liabilities. The total size of the muni bond market is about $2.4 trillion. Unfunded pension liabilities (calculated with a realistic discount rate) are almost as high, according to one study. Now comes James Pethokoukis of Reuters to tell us of a “secret GOP plan” to bankrupt local governments and crush the government unions.excerpt... My best guess...

How could the Tea Party elect five senators and 40 members of the United States Congress last November, none with political experience and many with evident eccentricities? The answer is that a single issue united a slapdash agglomeration of amateurs, with sufficient power to override all the sources of weakness. The Tea Party represents creditors of the government who do not want to be cheated out of their savings; that is, people close to retirement age who fear slow confiscation by inflation. Governments that run huge deficits normally reduce them by debasing the currency, in order to repay their debts...